The Avital Ronell story, cont.

It’s news: Avital Ronell returns to the classroom this fall, teaching a course titled Unsettled Scores: Theories of Grievance, Stuckness, and Boundary Troubles. My guess is that by semester’s end Ronell will still not understand boundaries but will have settled all scores.

From an advertisement for the course:

This course explores the literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis and political theories of straightjacketed existence. Is the stagnation of being a temptation or necessity? How are we confined within a grievance culture — by whom, to what purpose? Do we have enough agency to pull out of the psychic stalls or political stagnation fueled by misgivings and faltering assumptions? How does fiction manage these questions and reconfigure our being-toward-death?

I will admit: my skepticism about the intellectual content here makes it impossible for me to decide whether straightjacketed is a pun, a misspelling, or a deliberately chosen variant of straitjacketed.

*

May 13: NYU Local reports that some student-government members have condemned NYU’s decision to put Ronell back in the classroom:

Student Government Assembly (SGA) leaders wrote that the university’s decision to allow Ronell to return is “fundamentally antithetical to the University’s student-centered mission and stated commitment to survivors of sexual violence and abuse. Her reinstatement also reaffirms the status quo that survivors are not to be believed.”

A related post
The Avital Ronell story

Come to the Sunshine (and pronouns)

Highly recommended: Andrew Sandoval’s Come to the Sunshine, a radio show/podcast devoted to 1960s pop music. It’s splendid stuff. The show, which began in 2006, takes its name from a song by Van Dyke Parks. And yet I’m finding out about this show only now.

A couple of instances of remarkably proper pronoun use from my listening: “You Are She,” by Chad & Jeremy, and “Mister, You’re a Better Man Than I,” by the New Colony Six.

Bonus pronouns: an a cappella version of “You Are She,” and a longer, freakier “Mister, You’re a Better Man Than I.”

One elegant touch: Sandoval often has the songs he’s played running one by one under his voice as he announces them — a nice way to help the audience keep track of what was what.

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Duke Ellington was born 120 years ago today.

The cornetist Rex Stewart (1907–1967) was with the Ellington band from 1934 to 1945. Stewart played — and wrote — with great wit. Consider “Boy Meets Horn.” And consider this description of Ellington in the recording studio:

After saying hello to any guy who catches his eye, Duke seats himself at the piano and will either rhapsodize lazily, with his thoughts way up in the clouds, or he may break into a fast stomp reminiscent of a cutting session thirty-five years ago at True Reformers Hall in Washington, D.C. This is what he calls his warm-up, and we would know that the first number was to be something swinging, perhaps the still unintelligible tune that he hummed so loudly. Once that is over, the next thing we might hear is Duke saying, “All right, fellows, let’s see if the piano is in tune.” That means everybody tune up, which was the first thing we’d done on arrival, but he has to hear the sound from the various instruments.

Then, the fun begins as Duke reaches into his pocket, and with the air of a magician produces some scraggly pieces of manuscript paper — about one-eighth of a page on which he’d scribbled some notes. I recall one occasion when he’d jotted some notes for the saxophones (Toby Hardwick, Harry Carney, Ben Webster, and Barney Bigard) and each was given a part, but there was nothing for Johnny Hodges. Duke had the saxes run the sequence down twice, while Johnny sat nonchalantly smoking. Then, Duke called to Hodges, “Hey, Rabbit, give me a long slow glissando against that progression. Yeah! That's it!” Next he said to Cootie Williams, “Hey, Coots, you come in on the second bar, in a subtle manner growling softly like a little hungry lion cub that wants his dinner but can’t find his mother. Try that, okay?” Following that, he’d say, “Deacon,” (how Lawrence Brown hated that nickname) “you are cast in the role of the sun beating down on the scene. What kind of sound do you feel that could be? You don’t know? Well, try a high B-flat in a felt hat, play it legato and sustain it for eight bars. Come on, let’s all hit this together,” and that’s the way it went — sometimes.

Rex Stewart, “Duke Ellington: One of a Kind.” 1966. In Jazz Masters of the 1930s (1972).

Columbia University’s WKCR is playing Ellington all day. Right now: “The Feeling of Jazz,” from the album Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (1963).

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)
Rex Stewart on Ellington’s composing habits

Out of the past

Revealed in today’s Nancy : the snooty girl from the magnet school is named Mildred. First Esther, now Mildred: Olivia Jaimes is bringing back the names of the past.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Exams approaching

[Nancy, June 13, 1949.]

Poor Nancy. But Sluggo is Mr. Cool, or the emperor of ice cream. He knows how to do well on a final exam.

And for contrarians: How to do horribly on a final exam.

Best wishes to all about to take — or grade — final exams.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Iambic laundry

[Zippy, April 28, 2019.]

“Th’ clothes have more personality in the dryer. They cavort & gambol with each other.” I’m guessing that the ka-CHUNK of the machines is what makes Zippy think of iambic pentameter. But look at the meter of that sentence: “All laundry is a blur of static cling.” I think I know exactly what he means.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

“I mean the opposite of hatred”

From the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses. Leopold Bloom is speaking.


James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, begins with two giveaways: 1-Across, five letters, “1970s subject of a Maddow podcast series,” and 1-Down, five letters, ”Tiny tots with their eyes all     .” And then things get more difficult. But not overly difficult.

The clue that broke the puzzle open for me: 32-Down, four letters, “Burn rubber?” After that, I saw answer after answer and completed with puzzle with surprising 11-Down, five letters (“Expedition”).

Two clues that I especially liked: 40-Across, ten letters, “Place to buy a round.” And 42-Across, three letters, “Casual remarks.” If I were in the habit of wearing a hat indoors, I would take my hat off to you, Frank Longo, for those clues.

But I am baffled by 29-Down, four letters, “Limo wheels, maybe.” Being a member of the 6-Across, nine letters (“They’re not noble”), I may be out of my element when it comes to limo wheels.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

A bookstore in the Bronx

Tomorrow is Independent Bookstore Day. And in The Bronx it’s opening day for a new independent bookstore, The Lit. Bar. The borough has been without a general interest bookstore since 2016. Kudos to Noëlle Santos for bringing a bookstore to The Bronx.

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Bookstore-less Bronx

Politicians and Joyce

At The New Yorker, Kevin Dettmar, Joyce scholar, writes about “the politicians who love Ulysses”:

When Joyce surfaces in the tweets of Pete and Beto, it reassures us that these guys are familiar enough, and comfortable enough, with a big, difficult book to just drop a reference, casual-like. At a moment when it’s not clear that our President has ever finished an entire “chapter book” — even the one that he ghost-wrote with Tony Schwartz — these small gestures provide comfort.

Biden’s in there too.

That Pete Buttigieg drew the title of his memoir from Ulysses suggests a deep connection to Joyce. But when I read Beto O’Rourke’s description of Ulysses as “the same story” as the Odyssey, ”just told in what was then modern times set in Ireland,” I cringe a little.